Category Archives: Regional

Region-specific concerns, politics, issues

Primus – not with-it, hoopy froods

Primus are hopeless. They make Telstra look like really with-it, hoopy froods. I had no problems at all for about 4 years while I had just one phone line connected and didn’t try to change anything.

We signed up for another line. They connected the new line, and cut off the old one. Ring, complain, apologies. Disconnect the new line, reconnect the old. Ring, complain, apologies. The fun continued for a while.

Remember I said iPrimus had a great deal on ADSL? Not long after we signed up for ADSL, our line went dead. “Completely unrelated” says Primus. “Telstra line fault”. Sure. Have you tried reporting a dud phone line when the phone line’s dud? Doesn’t work so good.

Then there was a massive delay with the modem. Eventually we rung up and asked where it was. “We tried delivering it two weeks ago. No one was home. We left a card.” Searching high and low produced no card. However, we found the card the following weekend – they tried to deliver the modem to our old address. Which is not our billing address, or the address where the ADSL line was being set up. I have no idea why they’d want to deliver to that address.

They rung up last night about a missing payment. I didn’t get that bill. Somehow they sent it to 457/457 St Kilda St so I don’t know what would have happened to it. Probably lost in that great postal delivery hole in the sky. Much apologies later, late payment fee waived, all that stuff.

These guys seem to have a lot of bugs in their computer system. Being a telco in Australia only requires that you bill the customers and pay Telstra’s bills. So all primus needs to do is run a billing system. How hard could it be?

But their customer service after these stuff-ups is always really good. Once you get through to a human which can sometimes take a while. At least their call centre isn’t in India. That would be the last straw.

So That’s where our TV signal comes from!

Pretty roofline, poor reception

When we moved into the new home, I couldn’t find the TV antenna. But when we plugged in the TV, we got acceptable reception and then lazyiness kicked in. But the digital reception doesn’t cut it, so I decided to find out if our TV reception was coming from a coat hanger or something more sophisticated. Turns out you can hang an antenna in your roofspace using a length of rope and have a passable signal. Excpet for SBS. Pretty roofline, poor reception. A pretty roofline would be more important if it didn’t already have a evaporative cooling stack and a skylight breaking it up.

It’s winter here, and the roofspace was roasting hot. So, while the insulation had been abused and moved, there was enough of it doing it’s work that… gaugrh. Hot.

I also found out that our ventilation fans vent straight into the roofspace (great for both heat loss and moisture damage) and that our kitchen extractor fan doesn’t vent anywhere, even though it has a riser in the kitchen. Another housing disaster I’m going to have to address.

Now I need to buy a post to externally mount this bastard of an antenna onto. And a length of coax… or perhaps I’ll recycle one of the many lengths running around up there. There used to be a satelite TV link running off to the garage, I think that one might be long enough (turns out no: satelite hook-up was disconnected with wire cutters, leaving insufficient wire to make the distance). Currently the coax runs into a four-way splitter (three splits used), and I have my concerns that the splitter is contributing to our reception issues. Any opinions?

HDTV PVR: heartbeat

I tried hooking the cards up to the included antenna. Far worse than the bunny ears. Hooking the cards up to the house antenna made things a lot better. Channels nine and seven are 98% strength, two and ten are passable at ~80% strength, and SBS, with just 60%, is unwatchable.

My house antenna is a funny beast. I can’t find it. It doesn’t have a presence on my roofline. I have to go up into the roofspace this weekend to see if its one of those magical in-roofspace antennas, but I don’t think so. There used to be an antenna mount on the back of the house, which you can tell by the holes and lack of paint at that particular spot. I’m thinking a better antennna (or maybe even having an antenna) will improve the reception.

I’ve also got it doing output via the video card to the TV, but it’s not ideal as it stands. The TV software wants to put a grey boarder around the picture, which is fine if you’re watching a monitor, but bites arse if you’re watching a TV. And, not surprisingly, 16:9 doesn’t look that big on my 4:3 TV. Hopefully switching to PVR software like MythTV will help with this.

As for noise, the plan is to have the box in the next room and run cabling through the walls. Quieter. But it will make loading a DVD a pain in the butt.

So, more problem fixing, but given the hardware seems to work, I’m going to start fiddling with the OS next.

Proximity sense travel cards are vital; processes support falible memory

I lost my train ticket the other day. My monthly. A hundred bucks worth. I recalled that I’d validated it on the bus to get home (because the bus was there; I don’t wait for it if it’s not there – the timing’s a little vauge and I’m not that adverse to exercise). I remembered left in my back pocket along with a bus timetable. And I knew it was lost, because I have processes to deal with a decaying memory. I lock the car with the car keys now, because the car can be locked without them and I know that I can and have left the keys in the car; so locking it with the key means I can’t do that. I knew that I’d only recently walked in the door, and that I’d only been in a limited number of places. I knew that there was only one place it should have been, where I leave all my pcoket stuff – phone, wallet, MP3 player, keys, coins, ID lanyard and travel ticket. And it wasn’t there. Because I was in the process of trying to put it there. But the other stuff was. It wasn’t in any of my pockets.

I concluded that the only remaining explaination is that I had dropped it, which seemed ludicrous. How could that have happened? It was in my pocket! I retraced my steps back to the bus stop, and halfway there I found the bus pass. Another hundred metres and I found the ticket. During the walk home it had worked its way out, sliding up against the bus timetable and onto the footpath.

Now, the reason I had it in my back pocket was because it was a Friday, and on Fridays its casual day at work and as such my shirt didn’t have a pocket in it. So, there was process failure there, but it was to be expected. Little I can do about casual day.

I’ve had scares like this in the past. The reason I keep my ticket in my pocket is because I need it easily accessible, for feeding into the barriers to let me in and out of the train stations. There are most secure locations I can keep it, but they are less accessible. So I’ve left it in the pocket of the previous day’s shirt and not realised until I’ve arrived at the train station.

But the crux of the matter, the reason this is a GeekRant article, is because if the damn ticket was proximity detect I could keep it in my wallet or on my ID lanyard and never lose it and also have it ready to validate at a moment’s notice. The lanyard would be best, because then I couldn’t get to work without taking my lanyard with me, which would remove another thing I could forget and would inconvience me. And this is all the more important now that I’m lugging a thousand buck yearly ticket around with me. It’s not like it can’t be done either – all the validating machines have proximity sense detectors on them. At least the yearly tickets are plastic and will survive a trip through the washing machine.

Stupid MetCard.

New iTunes stores

iPod (from apple.com)Apple has opened new iTunes stores in… Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, with a free track for every Swiss citizen. (Großmutter! Schnell! Was ist Ihr voller Name und Geburtsdatum?)

And Australia? Well The Register says It was claimed this week that only major label troubles prevented the company from opening ITMS Australia last month as planned. Damn labels.

Meanwhile Apple continues to dominate in sales of music players, with new stats showing the iPod Shuffle has more than half of the US flash player market, and iTunes recently sold its 350 millionth song download.

All this is good news for the continued availability of non-copy-protected music. While Apple continues to sell and support MP3, but not WMA, and remains dominant in sales of hardware, MP3 will remain strong.

I don’t want a music format that’s copy protected. I don’t want to pay for music and have it die with my player. Like CDs, it has to last (I’ve got 17 year old discs that are still going strong) and be copyable, so I can move the music onto whatever the Next Great Device for my music is — whether it be a replacement iPod when my battery eventually gives up, or some other new and shiny device in a few years when the iPod seems old and clunky.

Though of course, in Australia at present, even just ripping your CDs to MP3 is illegal.

PS. 11pm. Actually I should probably use iTunes Store before blessing Apple too much, since there seems to be a lot of rumbling about whatever DRM they use.

More on iTunes AU, CH, SE, NO, DK

Country flagsAppleInsider has found the icons for the new iTunes countries, thereby confirming iTunes is about to start in Australia, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Not before time for those AU-ers among us. I’m seeing more and more of those white earplugs on the train to work.

It’ll be interesting to see how it goes. So far all the Australian online music stores have concentrated on selling protected WMA files. These haven’t been setting the world alight, partly of course because the files are useless for legions of iPod owners, and from observations, there are hardly any non-iPod portable music players out there in userland. And for myself, I’d refuse to buy files that won’t live beyond the (hopefully long but inevitably limited) life of my player.

Record companies must surely be waking up to it by now. They can’t copy-protect conventional CDs properly — it either breaks the Red Book standard (and thus compatibility) or it doesn’t work. Anything they try is either useless or has been hacked. So you might as well just sell MP3s. They’re no more vulnerable than CDs. And it’s better to be selling copyable songs than no songs at all.

And the reported Apple price of A$1.80 per track is competitive. A quick scout of some WMA-selling stores showed a typical price of A$1.89 per track, with top ten hits at A$0.99.

The other thing this week for Apple fans is the OS X “Tiger” release, though I’m sure they all already know that.

Firefox and application internationalism

Having installed the UK-spelling version of Firefox, it almost looks unnatural to see dialog(ue) boxes about “colours”. And I think it’s the downloads dialog that refers to saving to “disc”.

It’s a consequence of most IT-related innovation coming out of the USA that we’ve become used to US spelling dominating the world of computers. From Windows 95’s “Network Neighborhood” (yes, even when installing Windows with supposedly Australian English) to “floppy disks”, “dialog boxes” and of course IE’s “favorites”… You just learn to live with words spelt (spelled) just a little differently.

Admittedly it starts to get a little grating when spellcheckers claim “English” is the same as “US English” and otherwise usable applications keep showing the dates the wrong way around, or insist on two character states and five digit postcodes. Not to mention web sites that have a country dropdown list and put USA at the top (rather than, say, putting it in alphabetical order and defaulting to it).

And don’t get me started on programs that default to Letter sized paper instead of A4.

Ahem.

Anyway, one catch with having dispensed with Firefox’s US spelling is ending up on Google UK when searching. Fortunately the “Add Engines” feature of the search box is pretty easy to use. Search for your preferred engine eg Google Australia for me, and click to install it. Easy.

Removing the old Google UK option may be a little trickier, but it doesn’t much matter, since once you use the AU one, it sticks as the default.

VoIP ain’t gonna happen this month

I’ve just moved houses and thought it would be a grand idea to replace our fixed phone line with a VoIP phone like that supplied by Engin. Save the $30/month fixed line rental, skip the $60 connection fee and also upgrade our net connection to broadband, come out ahead with features and finances. Everything would be great.

What a stupid idea.

The VoIP service offered by Engin is $20/mo, so you are saving $10/mo on connectivity. Our ISP costs $10/mo, so the most we can afford to pay for an ISP and come out equal is $20/mo. But if we pay only that then we are effectively getting broadband for free. The VoIP is $150, but we’ll just ignore that cost. It’s only $90 more than hooking up a fixed line.

Obviously, to use a VoIP phone you need IP connectivity – an ISP. Okay, so we’ll just sign up to one of those $20 / 200meg plans ADSL and that’ll be great; I did some figuring and we’d use nothing like that kind of traffic, even with voice calls consuming 1K/sec (all figuring based on Engin’s figures, supplied in the user forum, which has been pulled – methinks because the users were slagging them off). No problem signing up for a couple of years, no worries, I’ll be in the new place for at least that long.

You can’t have ADSL without a fixed line phone.

You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. Cable, I’ll have cable. Call one of the two cable providers, the house has been cabled up by both. Except they’ve merged, to increase competition. No worries, I’ll call the only monopolistic cable provider, hook up (ought to be cheap, the house is already cabled up) and away we go. $279 to connect to your cable service?!?! $40/month to stay connected?!?! You Freaking WHAT?!

Fine. I happen to know that although cable and ADSL are widely regarded as your two options for broadband, there’s a third option here in Melbourne – radio. Alphalink provide superfast wireless access for only $33/mo; but connection is $286. But guess what? $33 is greater than $20. So we come out Losers.

So I resigned myself and we got a fixed line. And that’s why VoIP isn’t gonna happen this month, and I suspect won’t be happening for a long time yet.

EU busts MSFT

Okay in theory I’m all for reining in companies when they’re being monopolistic, but this decision of the Europeans to make them ship a copy of Windows without MediaPlayer strikes me as just a tad silly. Microsoft are about to launch this version in Europe, which they’re calling — wait for it — Windows XP Reduced Media Edition.

From the sounds of it, it’s basically XP (in Home or Pro versions) without MediaPlayer. SoundRec and the movie making thingy are still included.

Why would anybody choose to buy this? Unless it’s cheaper… in which case, couldn’t you just go and download MediaPlayer from Microsoft later?

And bear in mind the major competition here is… well, it’s RealPlayer, isn’t it. Ah yes, that mob whose web site sneakily tries to steer you to the paid version when you’re looking for the free one (and there’s no direct URL to the free one), insists on an e-mail address they can send advertising to, defaults to including a useless applet that sits in your icon tray, splashes advertising over itself when you start it, and sends lots of juicy info back to home base. (I do use RealPlayer, for all the BBC webcasts… I really must check out the alternatives at free-codecs.com. Thankfully the BBC have their own licensed RealPlayer freebie download which isn’t quite so objectionable.)

Now the ruling on opening up the interface code, that sounds like the sort of thing that is more likely to level the playing field.

Web site globalisation

It’s one thing to centralise your web site to a global location for efficiency, but how about a little customisation to allow for different countries. For instance, how many global web sites get you to search a location database, and come up with state names which are two characters, because the US programmers didn’t factor in that other countries would use anything else, and the local operations are too lazy to insist on it being fixed?

This was from Avis, looking for Australian offices. Hertz did the same. Budget didn’t. I’m almost amazed the postcodes didn’t have an extra leading zero.

At least this one has managed to avoid displaying the phone numbers as (xxx) xxx xxxx when it should be (xx) xxxx xxxx (like my old answering machine used to). Chucking the extra 0 after the 61 wasn’t particularly helpful though, as use one or the other depending on where you are… never both. Not unusual though.

Reminds me of an email exchange I had with CitySearch when they first launched in Australia, asking them why they were showing event dates in mm/dd/yyyy format. Sure enough, it was because they’d got the software from the US, and hadn’t figured out how to change it yet. Pretty shoddy.